


Paintings

by apollonious



Category: How to Train Your Dragon (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Reincarnation, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-16 19:27:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29458980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollonious/pseuds/apollonious
Summary: For hundreds of years, Hiccup has been living and dying over and over again, doomed always to paint Astrid but never to be with her.But now things have gotten more complicated.Because now Astrid knows.
Relationships: Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III/Astrid Hofferson
Comments: 14
Kudos: 37





	Paintings

Golden hair, blue eyes. 

It wasn’t exactly novel, not for the beauty Hiccup had been told he’d be working with, but she was beautiful nonetheless. There was fire in those eyes that burned like ice on bare skin as he looked at her, his eyes flicking back and forth from her to the canvas without resting too long on any one place. Her eyes never moved, though, boring into him where he sat lightly on his stool. 

She didn’t want him here.

And he could hardly blame her for that.

She never wanted him here. 

There was something fresh in the roundness of her face, the width of her cheekbones—a far cry from the narrow face and pointed chin he often heard praise for recreating in his work. But there was a sharpness there, in her chin, he thought, shaping it with a steady stroke of pale paint. 

“What do your parents want a portrait for anyway?” he asked. “Wouldn’t they rather have one of those lithographs people have started getting done?”

“A portrait is traditional,” she said coolly.

“Old-fashioned, you mean.” There—his brush darted into the pink and captured the curve of her lips before it vanished. 

“Plenty of women get portraits painted,” she said. “And you should hardly be complaining.”

“Did I say I was complaining?” Hiccup asked, meeting her eyes over the canvas. “Besides, I’m a far cry from Mr. Sargent.”

“Well, that may not be a bad thing,” she said. “You must have heard about what happened, last year in Paris.”

Hiccup sighed. “I’m afraid I’m far too pedestrian for a scandal involving a shoulder strap,” he said. “But I’d give my left foot to have my name remembered the way his will be.”

She didn’t say anything.

“You’re marrying a railroad tycoon, right?”

Astrid nodded.

“New money,” he said, nodding sagely, and her cheeks flushed. Whatever ground he’d made by commiserating about portraits being old-fashioned, he’d lost it again. 

Good.

Using a fresh brush, he took up some of the steel-blue of her dress and started working at her shoulder, which he hadn’t quite gotten right. His hand moved in a long, defined stroke, and his brow furrowed. 

“What are you frowning at?” she demanded.

His eyes flicked up to meet hers. “Your collarbone,” he said. “If you’ll pardon my boldness, milady.” Her lips pressed together, and he smiled slightly. “Miss Hofferson.” A blush was coming into her cheeks now, rather different from the indignation he’d earned only a minute ago. “Too much clarity of form might be displeasing to your father.” With a few quick strokes, he softened the definition in her shoulder, definition she definitely had, but he wasn’t being paid to show her strength. 

All the same, he could see the fire he’d put in her eyes; that was too much part of her for him to ignore, and it always had been. He knew all too well how those eyes could stick in his head.

“And my... form,” she said. “It lends itself to... to clarity?”

Hiccup’s eyes flickered up in surprise. For once, he wasn’t sure what to say, and he ducked his chin again before she could see the pink in his cheeks. 

The truth was, it did. It very much did. She was thin, with muscles evident along her arms that rather suggested she hadn’t adhered to behavior becoming of a lady, and her waist wasn’t as defined as many women’s, and her bosom... well, the less he thought about her bosom the better. He still had to paint it, after all. But this was not her on the canvas in front of him, he reminded himself—not eyes and lips and shoulders and bosom—it was just lines and dabs of paint.

The real Astrid was out of his reach, as she had been almost as long as he could remember. And he could remember a very long time.

“I couldn’t say, Miss Hofferson,” he finally said. 

When he looked up, she hadn’t looked away from his face. She was gazing at him intently, unwavering in her study. 

“Do you think you’ll move out west after you’re married?” he asked. 

“I hope so,” she said, and despite himself he met her eyes. “I want to see something new.” 

Hiccup swallowed, nodding. He could relate.

* * *

Golden hair, blue eyes. 

Astrid’s chin was tipped back as she looked up at the stained glass window high above, lips parted in what Hiccup could only describe as reverence, though he knew neither gods nor God had ever really been her thing. Still, he could appreciate the appreciation of beauty for its own sake. He’d been in this church countless times, although before this trip, the last had been before the construction of its distinctive spire in the nineteenth century. Frankly, he had preferred it without the spire, though he found himself glad that they had rebuilt it in the restoration after the fire several years previously.

She looked around at him as he walked up to her, and gave a half-smile that he returned. She was wearing a slouchy beanie— _his_ beanie—with a gray coat over a dress whose steel-blue color made his heart ache, and boots over leggings. Perfect for an autumn day in Paris, though part of him wanted to wrap a scarf around her neck to really nail the look. His scarf, the one he’d wound around his shoulders on his way out of the little flat he was renting, would do the trick. The richness of the red would contrast nicely with her dress, and if he arranged it just so... but that would be too much like claiming her.

“You like the stained glass?” he asked.

She nodded. “A riot of color—”

“—in a dreary gray world.” He smirked at the perturbed look she gave him. “I’ve seen that movie too.”

Astrid nodded, looking back toward the window. “Such a good movie for beautiful people. Heath Ledger.”

“Shannyn Sossamon.”

“Alan Tudyk.”

“Paul Bettany.” She looked at him, brows furrowed, and he merely shrugged. The topic hadn’t really come up in the week and a half he’d been squiring her around the city, but she didn’t seem too surprised about it, only giving a sort of nod after a second.

They were quiet for another minute or so, both examining the finer details of the window, Hiccup trying to examine the finer details of Astrid without her noticing, before she took a deep breath and let it out. “How much are they paying you?”

Hiccup’s head jerked to stare at her, but her gaze hadn’t shifted. “How much is who paying me? We’re just hanging out, remember?”

Her jaw clenched, and he found himself wanting to cup her cheek in his hand and— _nope._ “Don’t play dumb with me,” she said. “My dad. My brother. I’m guessing they’re having you do it for a bridal shower gift or something. Or maybe it’s just one of them. But how much?”

Hiccup sighed. It would seem there was no point in pretending not to know what she was talking about any longer. “Five grand,” he said. 

Astrid let out a low whistle, incongruous with the inside of the church. “That’s a lot of money for a couple of weeks of work,” she said. “I assume you’re almost done, anyway.”

“Actually, I’ve been having some trouble with it,” he said. 

She met his eyes, giving him a cheeky grin despite the anger he could see simmering in her eyes. “Don’t want to be parted from me?”

Oh, she had no idea. He’d spent _decades_ at the start of the last century not having painted her, or even seen her, having somehow managed to get himself killed in both World Wars—not an experience he’d recommend—which had thrown off their timeline somewhat. After the cycle where she’d married the railroad tycoon, it had taken half a century for them to get lined back up. And now here they were, more than half a century after that, half a century where she’d been first his muse, and then his client in her own right. It had been the longest cycle they’d ever had, in all the centuries they’d been living this over and over, and the closest Hiccup had come to happiness in a thousand years. 

And now here they were, strangers again.

Astrid didn’t seem as angry as she ought to be at the confirmation that her artist friend who’d met her seemingly by chance her first day in Paris, who’d shown her the museums and the cafes, and brought her here more than once—for the lighting, he’d told himself—had been doing all this to surreptitiously observe her, and then paint her once they’d parted. Rather, she seemed... preoccupied. 

She pulled her left hand out of her coat pocket, idly examining the ring that sat on her finger. It was garish, Hiccup thought, the diamond too large for his taste. He really ought to be used to seeing rings on her hand, as much as he’d had to these past centuries, but the sight of each new one always made his stomach lurch. 

“When did you start remembering?” she asked.

Hiccup’s mouth fell open as he stared at her, aghast, his awareness suddenly narrowing to her and only her. “What—” he started, but couldn’t bring himself to act like he didn’t know what she was asking.

After a second her eyes met his, and in them he saw recognition, the sort of long-held knowledge that hadn’t been there since their very first life, before the cycle started. He could have wept at the sight of it; he’d missed that look for so long, had yearned to look at her and see her, the woman he’d loved since he was a boy—well, since the first time he was a boy—looking back at him. Knowing him. He nearly fell to his knees, there in the cathedral, but instead he managed to simply swallow hard and square his shoulders.

“The tower,” he said quietly.

“The tower?” she demanded. “Since the goddamn _tower,_ Hiccup? Why didn’t you say anything?”

His head was reeling. “I—I couldn’t,” he said. “That was part of the deal.” Then he realized something. “Wait— _you_ remember the tower?”

She nodded tightly. “I saw the painting.”

Hiccup took a long, deep breath. “Do you remember how it started? The—our first life?”

Astrid looked away. “No, I don’t. Do you?”

He swallowed. “Yeah.” Part of him had hoped that she would have remembered it once she started remembering past times they’d met. “So... once you see one of the paintings, you remember the life it’s from?”

“I think so,” she said. 

“How many... how many have you seen?”

She gave him a sidelong look. “A couple.”

Of course, he desperately wanted to know which ones, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to ask. Part of him, which only moments ago had been exulting in the awareness that _she knew,_ that on some level he wasn’t alone anymore, cracked with despair. Because he didn’t know where most of the paintings were, didn’t know what condition they were in. It would be the work of a lifetime to find them all, to show them to her so that she could remember their lives. Possibly the work of several lifetimes. 

And he’d destroyed several of them himself in rage and despair, in the early days when a portrait painter who cycled through lives with his subject could easily do five or six paintings of her in a century. Which meant that, if she was right and she remembered a life she’d lived after seeing the painting he’d done of her during that life, those lives were lost to her forever. And he was the one who had taken them away from her.

The first one, though... He might be able to do something about the first one.

“So... the first day we met,” he said. “You recognized me?”

Astrid laughed. He didn’t know how she could. “Of course. You think I would’ve gone off with some stranger?”

“And here I thought it was my charming demeanor.” He paused. “You have done that before, you know.”

“Gone off with a stranger?” Astrid asked.

“Gone off with me when I was a stranger,” Hiccup said. He’d died so many ways—battle, plague, stabbed by highwaymen—but he’d only ever died by her side once. 

He wondered if the record of that life still existed. 

“Hiccup?” Astrid said. “What happened?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Tell me how it started.”

He turned to look at her, his heart twisting as those sweet, impossibly blue eyes blazed at him. “Astrid—”

“If I’m fated to an existence where I keep coming back just long enough to be painted, my sole companion some artist who apparently dies and comes back with me for some reason”—his heart twisted again—“if I’m going to carry the memories of other _lives_ for all eternity, I think I deserve to know _why,_ don’t you?”

“Of course you do,” Hiccup said. “I just—Astrid, it’s been a thousand years.”

“So what, you don’t remember?”

“I remember every second of it,” he said, his voice rough. 

“Then tell me.” Her eyes flashed with barely-reined fury. It was one of the most beautiful sights he’d ever seen, so incredibly _her,_ and as familiar to him as his own face, despite the fact that she hadn’t looked at him like this, hadn’t known him, in almost a millennium.

Hiccup took a long, shaky breath and let it out. “I can’t.”

“Why not?” Astrid demanded.

“It’s part of the deal.”

“What deal?” She was shouting now, drawing the attention of the other tourists and guides in the church. Hiccup glanced around at them nervously, and she stepped up to him, lowering her voice again. “You know what? Fine. Finish your painting, get your money. But if you don’t tell me what happened, why I have to live like this, I will never forgive you. In this life or any other.”

And she turned and stormed away from him, out of the church, as the bells overhead began to ring.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading! I hope you liked it. I'm kind of nervous about this one. 
> 
> And yes, for anyone wondering, the playlist for this fic _does_ have a string quartet cover of "Thnks fr th Mmrs" by Fall Out Boy on it. 
> 
> Thanks again! Let me know what you think!


End file.
